American Language (82 page)

It will be noted that 57% of the total errors discovered involved the use of the verb, and that nearly half of these, or 24% of the total, involved a confusion between the preterite and the perfect participle. Difficulties with pronouns accounted for 14%, double negatives for 11% and the confusion of adjectives and adverbs for 4%. The (
b
) group, composed of children of grades VI and VII, in both of which grammar was studied, made almost the same errors, and in substantially the same proportions. Those in the use of the verb dropped from 57% to 52%, but those in the use of pronouns remained at 14%, and those involving the double negative remained at 11%. In the written work of the (
c
) group certain changes appeared, but they were hardly significant. The percentage of errors
in the use of verbs dropped to 50, and those involving the double negative to 1, but those in the use of pronouns rose to 24.

Dr. Charters, of course, confined himself to a comparative study of errors actually made and observed, and no attempt was made to relate them statistically to instances of correct usage. Twelve years later Dr. Robert J. Menner of Yale argued that this method was “likely to produce an exaggerated impression of the frequency of errors”
⁶
— obviously, a plausible contention. Since then several efforts have been made to investigate the material quantitatively, but so far without results that meet every critical standard. The most ambitious of these attempts was that of Dr. L. J. O’Rourke and his associates in 1930–33. With the coöperation of 40,000 teachers they sought to test the grammatical knowledge of 1,500,000 public-school children, ranging from the third grade to the thirteenth, in the forty-eight States of the Union, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the Philippines. Their test-papers included three categories of questions. The first had to do with such essentials as Charters covered in his inquiry; their second concerned more delicate matters, and their third included points properly belonging to style rather than to grammar,
e.g.
, the use of
he
or
his
following
one
as a pronoun. The percentages of children passing the tests of the first category, in the grades from the seventh to the thirteenth, were as follows:

These figures, if they are to be depended upon as reasonably accurate, show that the schoolmarm’s efforts to inculcate “good grammar” have some effect, but they also show that more than half the school-children of the country speak the vulgate at least up to the first year of high-school. And what they speak, of course, is simply what they hear at home.
⁸
Indeed, Dr. Menner’s own inquiries indicate
that many of the errors on Dr. O’Rourke’s list are common among persons presumably educated. His observations were made on the speech of about forty men and women, divided into three classes, described by him as follows:

He found that individuals of his second class sometimes used
begin, come, done, give, sit
and
run
as preterites, and
broke, drank, rode
and
threw
as perfect participles, and that even those of his first class, “trained in some special profession (usually with college degrees),” occasionally resorted to
begin, come, done
and
give, broke
and
drank
. “The most meticulous speakers,” he said, “occasionally lapse into carelessness, just as the most illiterate sometimes attempt to speak elegantly.” This tendency, naturally enough, is chiefly found among educated persons living in close association with uncultured groups. The “bad grammar” of the Southern whites was noted by the earliest travelers below the Potomac, and it is still observable there, even in the loftiest circles. All of us, on occasion, slip easily into the circumambient speech habits, if only to enjoy their pleasant looseness, just as an educated German sometimes slips into the
Mundart
of his province. And what is thus borrowed from below not infrequently finds more or less secure lodgment above, as the frequent appearance of
it’s me, rile, broke
and
bust
in perfectly good American usage well demonstrates.
⁹

Dr. Menner argues that any list of conjugations of the verbs of the vulgate should include a “liberal intersprinkling of normal principal parts, at least as alternatives.” But it must be manifest that this intersprinkling would be of little significance unless it were accompanied by statistical evidence as to the prevalence of the varying forms in a typical section of the general population. That evidence is still lacking, but meanwhile one may certainly give some credit to the testimony of one’s ears. The vulgar, to be sure, occasionally say
I saw
, but no one who has ever listened to their speech attentively can doubt that they usually say
I seen
, just as, at the other end of the scale the
illuminati
occasionally say
I done
,
¹⁰
but usually say
I did
. If the study of dialects had to include the investigation of all shadings up to the purest form of the standard speech, then the study of dialects would be vain, and indeed absurd. As Dr. Menner himself says, there are verbs which the people of his lowest class conjugate improperly “without exception,”
e.g., to come
and
to run
. These, at least, need not be outfitted with alternatives. In the case of other verbs, usage among the humble is not fixed, and both the standard preterites and perfect participles and their vulgar variants are heard. In yet other cases, all persons not downright illiterate reveal a distaste for certain forms,
e.g., brung, fit
and
druv
, and seldom employ them save in conscious attempts at waggishness. But all these verbs, save only those of the third class, actually belong to the vulgate, though they may not be used invariably, and their grammatical and syntactical history and relations deserve a great deal more patient study than they have got so far. The same thing is true of the pronouns of the common speech, and of all its other contents. The theory that it is somehow
infra dig
to investigate them is one that American scholarship can hardly entertain much longer.
¹¹

Rather curiously, the
sermo vulgus
was for long as diligently neglected by the professional writers of the country as by the philologians. There are foreshadowings of it in “The Biglow Papers,” in “Huckleberry Finn” and in some of the frontier humor of the years before the Civil War, but the enormous dialect literature of the later Nineteenth Century left it almost untouched. Localisms in vocabulary and pronunciation were explored at length, but the general folk-speech went virtually unobserved. It is not to be found in “Chimmie Fadden”; it is not in “David Harum”; it is not even in the fables of George Ade. It began to appear in the stories of Helen Green during the first years of the century, but the business of reporting it with complete accuracy had to wait for Ring Lardner, a Chicago newspaper reporter, who began experimenting with it in 1908 or thereabout. In his grotesque but searching tales of baseball-players, pugilists, movie queens, song-writers and other such dismal persons he set down common American with the utmost precision, and yet with enough imagination to make his work a contribution of genuine and permanent value to the national literature. In any story of his taken at random it is possible to unearth almost every grammatical peculiarity of the vulgar speech, and he always resisted very stoutly the temptation to lay on its humors too thickly. Here, for example, are a few typical sentences from “The Busher’s Honeymoon”:
¹²

Here are specimens to fit into most of Charters’s categories — verbs confused as to tense, pronouns confused as to case, double and even triple negatives, nouns and verbs disagreeing in number,
have
softened to
of, n
marking the possessive instead of
s, like
used in place of
as
, and so on. A study of the whole story would probably unearth all the remaining errors noted by Charters in Kansas City. Lardner’s baseball player, though he has pen in hand and is on his guard, and is thus very careful to write
would not
instead of
wouldn’t
and even
am not
instead of
ain’t
, provides us with a comprehensive and highly instructive panorama of popular linguistic habits. To him the forms of the subjunctive mood in the verb have no existence, so that
shall
has almost disappeared from his vocabulary, and adjectives and adverbs are indistinguishable, and the objective case in the pronoun is indicated only by word order. He uses the word that is simplest, the grammatical pattern that is handiest. And so he moves toward the philological millennium dreamed of by George T. Lanigan, when “the singular verb shall lie down with the plural noun, and a little conjunction shall lead them.”
¹³
This vulgar American is a very fluent and even garrulous fellow, and he commonly
pronounces his words distinctly, so that his grammatical felonies shine forth clearly. In the conversation of a London Cockney, a Yorkshire farm-laborer or a Scots hillman precisely similar
attentats
upon the canon are obscured by phonological muddiness, but the Americano gives his consonants their full values and is kind to his vowels. His vocabulary is much larger than his linguistic betters commonly assume. They labor under a tradition that the lowly manage to get through life with a few hundred or a few thousand words. That tradition, according to a recent writer on the subject,
¹⁴
“originated with two English clergymen, one of whom stated that ‘some of the laborers in his parish had not three hundred words in their vocabulary,’ while the other, Archdeacon Farrar, said he ‘once listened for a long time together to the conversation of three peasants who were gathering apples among the boughs of an orchard, and as far as I could conjecture, the whole number of words they used did not exceed a hundred.’ ” The famous Max Müller gave imprudent support to this nonsense, and it was later propagated by Wilhelm Wundt, the psychologist, by Barrett Wendell, and by various other persons who should have known better. It has now been established by scientific inquiry that even children of five or six years have vocabularies of between 2000 and 3000 words, and that even the most stupid adults know at least 5000. The average American, indeed, probably knows nearly 5000 nouns. As for the educated, their vocabularies range from 30,000 words to maybe as many as 70,000.
¹⁵

The chief grammatical peculiarities of vulgar American lie, as Charters shows, among the verbs and pronouns. The nouns in common use, in the main, are quite sound in form. Very often, of course, they do not belong to the vocabulary of English, but they at least belong to the vocabulary of American: the proletariat, setting aside transient slang, calls things by their proper names, and pronounces those names more or less correctly. The adjectives, too, are treated rather politely, and the adverbs, though commonly transformed into the forms of their corresponding adjectives, are not further mutilated. But the verbs and pronouns undergo changes which set off the common speech very sharply from both correct English and correct American. This process, of course, is only natural, for it is among the verbs and pronouns that nearly all the remaining inflections in English are to be found, and so they must bear the chief pressure of the influences that have been warring upon every sort of inflection since the earliest days. The hypothetical Indo-European language is assumed to have had eight cases of the noun; in Old English they fell to four, with a moribund instrumental, identical in form with the dative, hanging in the air; in Middle English the dative and accusative began to decay; in Modern English they have disappeared altogether, save as ghosts to haunt grammarians. But we still have two plainly defined conjugations of the verb, and we still inflect it, in part at least, for number and person. And we yet retain an objective case of the pronoun, and inflect it for person, number and gender.